Clinton's Foreign-Aid Strategy

December 7, 1992

One of the key appointments for President-elect Clinton will be his selection of the director of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Post- cold-war foreign policy is very new territory for all of the global players. The real threats to global stability - poverty, hunger, and illiteracy - are by-products of cold-war policies of covert militarism in the guise of development assistance. These policies bred civil war and facilitated strife all over the world.

The goals agreed to at the 1990 World Summit for Children are a mandate for a new vision in foreign assistance. Bill Foege, head of the Carter Center, Tony Hall, chairman of the House Select Committee on Hunger, and former Congressman Matthew McHugh, lead sponsor of the World Summit for Children Implementation Act, are powerful candidates for leaders of USAID.

Bill Clinton must be urged to make eliminating poverty a centerpiece of his foreign policy. Meeting the goals of the World Summit for Children should be the core of that strategy, and he should start by putting someone with a vision for achieving that strategy at the helm of USAID. Ken Buxton, Ridgewood, N.J.